Frightful 7 Quotes & Sayings

Strange and harrowing must be his story; frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course, and wrecked it
thus! — Mary Shelley

A lot of celebrities just want money, fame, power, fancy cars, houses all over the world and have people bow down to them. To me, that's frightful behaviour. — Shirley Manson

WITH GOD YOU CAN TURN YOUR impeaching importunities into optimal opportunities. Frightful frustration into fortifying fortunes. Humble attitudes into higher altitudes .Distress disabilities into affluent abilities. Incalculable incapacity into calibrated capabilities. Protracted poverty into pronounced prosperity. Subtracting adversity into multiplying advantage. Intimidating invalidities into valuable validities. Weeping profession into a winning prowess .worrisome weariness into wholesome health. Multiple miseries into a myriad of treasures. Possessive problems into progressive productivity. Earthly human co-incidence into heavenly divine "God-incidence". — Ikechukwu Joseph

It is among uneducated women that we may look for the most confirmed gossips. Goethe tells us there is nothing more frightful than bustling ignorance. — Nicolas Chamfort

I have used the words and expressions which my experiences from Minsk to Kharkov to the Don suggested to me. But I should have reserved those words and expressions for what came later, even though they are not strong enough. It is a mistake to use intense words without carefully weighing and measuring them, or they will have already been used when one needs them later. It's a mistake, for instance, to used the word frightful to describe a few broken up companions mixed into the ground: but it's a mistake that might be forgiven. — Guy Sajer

They are asleep. This is the condition they prefer. They are afraid of the world and sleep is a way of dealing with their fear. Someday they will wake. Perhaps something frightful will happen. Indeed, there is no better invitation to the frightful than ignorance - that is, sleep. (29) — Stephen Dobyns

The vice and drunkenness among the lowering laboring classes is growing to frightful excess, and the multitudes of low Irish Catholics ... restricted by poverty in their own country run riot in this ... as long as we are overwhelmed with Irish immigrants, so long will the evil abound. — John Pintard

I like B. Wooster the way he is. Lay off him, I say. Don't try to change him, or you may lose the flavour. Even when we were merely affianced, I recalled, this woman had dashed the mystery thriller from my hand, instructing me to read instead a perfectly frightful thing by a bird called Tolstoy. At the thought of what horrors might ensue after the clergyman had done his stuff and she had a legal right to bring my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave, the imagination boggled. It was a subdued and apprehensive Bertram Wooster who some moments later reached for the hat and light overcoat and went off to the Savoy to shove food into the Trotters. The — P.G. Wodehouse

The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of anticipation. - You behold the frightful, soul-stirring scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase - in blood, in suffering, in death. — Leo Tolstoy

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the storm tracks
of the milky way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow. — Stanley Kunitz

We're all of us what we are; and when it comes to turning ourselves into what we ought to be-well, it isn't easy. No, it isn't easy, Anthony Beavis. How can you expect to think in anything but a negative way when you've got chronic intestinal poisoning? Had it from birth I guess. Inherited it. And at the same time stooping, as you do. Slumped down on your mule like that - it's awful. Pressing down on the vertebrae like a ton of bricks. One can almost hear the poor things grinding together. And when the spine's in that state, what happens to the rest of the machine? It's frightful to think of. — Aldous Huxley

She had the look of someone who'd declared herself, and seeing it, my indignation collapsed and her mutinous bath turned into something else entirely. She'd immersed herself in forbidden privileges, yes, but mostly in the belief she was worthy of those privileges. What she'd done was not a revolt, it was a baptism. I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it. As Handful began to shove the vessel back across the piazza, I tried to speak. ". . . . . . Wait. . . . . . I'll. . . . . . help . . ." She turned and looked at me, and we both knew. My tongue would once again attempt its suicide. — Sue Monk Kidd

All three of them stood for a moment gazing at the stars.
'And all these are worlds,' said Hagen.
'Or else,' said Clements with a yawn, 'a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it. — Vladimir Nabokov

Tired of life, afraid of death, not unlike
A lost brig, toy of ebb and flow on the ocean,
My soul weighs anchor for a frightful shipwreck. — Paul Verlaine

Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars. — Novalis

He opposed the hardness acquired during the last twenty years of his life. This state of mind fatigued him. He perceived with dismay that the sort of frightful calm which the injustice of his misfortune had conferred upon him was giving way within them. — Victor Hugo

It is acknowledged that neither convict prisons, nor the hulks, nor any system of hard labour ever cured a criminal. These forms of chastisement only punish him and reassure society against the offences he might commit. Confinement, regulation, and excessive work have no effect but to develop with these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitrations. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

People seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Some people, he says, they hide themselves away from the eyes of the world. They hunker down and shiver. They find four walls high enough to put between them and everything else. Those people, to them the world is a frightful place. See, you and me, we're different. When we are called on to move, we move. It don't matter the cause or the distance. Revenge or ministration, reason or folly - it's all the same to us. — Alden Bell

That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon. There are certain intellectuals who are too bright to be content with merely praising peace but who are infuriated by anybody praising war. If no war is possible, all criminality has its chance — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life. — Jean-Paul Sartre

A pregnant woman is a frightful object. A new-born child is loathsome. A deathbed rarely makes so horrible an impression as childbirth, that terrible symphony of screams and filth and blood. — Hjalmar Soderberg

Nothing will ever equal that moment of joyous excitement which filled my whole being when I felt myself flying away from the earth. It was not mere pleasure; it was perfect bliss. Escaped from the frightful torments of persecution and of calumny, I felt that I was answering all in rising above all.
[Said after making man's first ascent by hydrogen balloon in 1783] — Jacques Charles

I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. — H.P. Lovecraft

I honestly believe that the doctrine of hell was born in the glittering eyes
of snakes that run in frightful coils watching for their prey. I believe
it was born with the yelping, howling, growling and snarling of wild beasts ...
I despise it, I defy it, and I hate it. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Dexter did not kick the can. And now Dexter is It. Again. You may wonder, how can this be? How can Dexter's night hunt be reduced to this? Always before there has been some frightful twisted predator awaiting the special attention of frightful twisted Dexter - and here I am, stalking an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can that is guilty of nothing worse than bland sauce. — Jeff Lindsay

The strategic aspect of General Joffre's policy was not less stultified than the administrative. The easterly and north-easterly attacks into which his four Armies of the Right and Centre were impetuously launched, were immediately stopped and hurled back with a slaughter so frightful that it has never yet been comprehended by the world. His — Winston S. Churchill

Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal. — Honore De Balzac

The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. — Jorge Luis Borges

Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented ... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort - as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails. — Robert Green Ingersoll